July 2010 Archives

Social networking on the Internet no doubt is the current and perhaps future Big Thing. But how confident are social networkers that their privacy is protected? Not so much, according to a recent Marist Poll.

Indeed, the poll indicates that 23% are "very concerned" and another 27% are "concerned" about their social networking privacy. So, one out of two social networkers are worried about privacy.

A new effort is being made in Congress to impose state sales taxes on online sales. H.R. 5660, aka the Main Street Fairness Act, was introduced earlier this month by Rep. Bill Delahunt (D. MA.). The bill, if it were to become law, would authorize the collection of state taxes on Internet sales, even if a given Internet seller does not have a physical presence with a specific taxing state.

The bill says that "as a matter of economic policy and basic fairness, similar sales transactions should be treated equally, without regard to the manner in which sales are transacted, whether in person, through the mail, over the telephone, on the Internet, or by other means."

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has settled with Twitter with respect to charges that during the first half of 2009 a hacker used an automated password-guessing tool to gain administrative control of Twitter, enabling the sending of phony tweets. Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter is barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about its efforts to protect the security, privacy and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, and Twitter must maintain a comprehensive information security program that will be assessed by an independent auditor over the course of ten years.

The reception and antenna problems with the iPhone 4 have already been blowing up the news. Lawsuits have been filed, techies are up in arms and iPhone enthuistists have been stuck ordering $30 cases to keep their calls from dropping.

Things started off swimmingly for Apple with the iPhone 4; the company sold 1.7 million iPhones in the first three days. The steel band that frames the new iPhone was touted as a design improvement that would increase the power of the antenna over previous iPhones.

The only problem is, it tends to drop calls when you make contact with the lower left portion of the phone while you're making calls, which is, needless to say, quite inconvenient.